On the pulse

“We cannot continue to invest in the same service models of the past. We need a radical shift in how the NHS sees itself, from a hospital service for the ill, to a nationwide service to keep us healthy.”

It’s now five years since we launched Nursing Times Learning, our suite of online learning units, and in that time nurses have used it to complete over 35,000 hours’ CPD. After months of planning, editorial enhancements and technical design work, we are delighted to have launched a new learning system to better meet nurses’ professional development needs.

In his recent report into whistleblowing Sir Robert Francis QC felt the need to call for legal protection for staff who raise concerns about care. This is a full two years on from his report into care failings at Mid Staffs, which lifted the lid on how the organisation treated staff who spoke up.

I like to think that one of the reasons we love the NHS is that the general population in the UK has a sense of fairness that is largely independent of where individuals stand on the political spectrum. We may argue about the finer details but the overwhelming majority of us agree that a healthcare system that is free at the point of need is fair.

We’re coming up to two years since Sir Robert Francis QC published his report into care failings at Mid Staffs. Unlike many “seminal” and “watershed” reports on the NHS and healthcare more widely, which lie gathering dust having been ignored by those targeted with recommendations, the Francis report has already led to changes in government policy and health service practice.

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) must come to terms with having a progressive and incurable disease that will increasingly limit their capacity for physical activity, and is almost certain to cause their death. And the fact that it affects the ability to breathe means they are constantly reminded of this frightening prospect.

The horrifying ebola epidemic currently running out of control in West Africa seemed a distant problem not too long ago. Voluntary organisations such as MSF and the World Health Organization had been warning for some time that it was rapidly turning from a largely healthcare problem into a social and economic catastrophe, but still it was happening to “other people”.

Public health has long been the poor relation in the healthcare family. While preventing ill health may seem an obvious candidate for generous funding, too many aspects of this important area of healthcare have been largely sidelined for decades.

Whenever NHS services are reorganised to offer specialist services in centres of excellence there tends to be a public outcry about the loss of local services, with accusations that the reorganisation is an attempt to cut spending. Local MPs vociferously defend those on their patch – often when the reorganisation is the result of their own party’s policies.

As a board member of a trust put into special measures after a series of high-profile problems including patient deaths, a director of nursing’s first instinct might be to stay below the media parapet – even if the problems didn’t happen on her watch. However, Sue Smith of University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Foundation Trust has come out fighting to change perceptions of her trust and in particular its nurses and midwives in an exclusive ...

News that heavy drinkers are to be considered for liver transplants led to a predictable flurry of comments on national press websites. Many were along the lines of “it’s a waste of a liver”, “why should I fund surgery that just lets them carry on drinking”, or “the NHS shouldn’t offer this to people who have brought it on themselves”.

A year on from publication of the Francis report, The Nuffield Trust has published a report on how NHS trusts have responded to Francis’ shocking findings and wide-ranging recommendations. So how much progress has been made?

Only a couple of decades ago you could, in theory, qualify as a nurse and spend 40 years in the profession without undertaking any form of study or updating. And while examples of nurses who did that may be few and far between I’m long enough in the tooth to remember the introduction of PREP in the 1990s, and I know a few did exist.

In Opinion

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